14 DAY TRIAL // The FreeBSD Project announced a few minutes ago that the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.2 operating system is now available for download and testing through the usual channels.
According to the changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, FreeBSD 10.2 RC1 is here to add IPv6 support to the quota utility, to add support for DTrace monitoring for txg_quiesce() calls using the use __noinline() function in ZFS' txg_quiesce() function, as well as to add support for keeping configurations during VMs migrations in the Xen netfront interface.
The tcpdump utility has been updated with support for fetching capsicum rights for dump file rotation, support for i386 (32-bit) hardware architectures has been added to the ggatel and ggatec utilities, support for setting sysctl tunable entries in loader.conf has been added to the ixgbe driver, and support for detecting extra Intel Lynx Point devices was added to the ichwd driver.
Furthermore, there's support for canonicalizing hostnames before locating them in the hosts file in the ssh utility, an issue with IPv6 addresses has been fixed, various issues with aligning partitions on 1MB boundaries when using the ZFS file system were addressed, several TCP problems were fixed, the PMC Sierra SAS/SATA driver has been updated, and the sfxge driver now supports firmware versions lower than 4.2.1.
Several other new features arrived in FreeBSD 10.2 RC1
Moreover, the first Release Candidate of FreeBSD 10.2 reverts the changes made to the kernel timecounter components that were introduced in the stable branch of the operating system, updates kernel's DTrace functionality, add support for ping8's '-X' and '-x' options to the ping6 utility, and there are several improvements to the pkg configuration file found in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf.
Last but not least, issues with jail.conf's offset calculations in variable substitutions were fixed, a problem with a cloned device's group membership, which occurred when the device was moved, has been addressed, and the gifconfig and gif_interfaces examples were removed. You can download FreeBSD 10.2 RC1 right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that it's a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.